This week, you are to address the question
of how you should counsel people who are suffering.Question #1 is a bit confusing with regard to the
“can/should” component.
Question #2 may also require some translation.Here is how I want you to “translate” these questions:

As you approach these questions, I would
like you to imagine that you are actually sitting in an office and
your first client comes in to see you.He/she is hurting physically and emotionally.See if you can start to conceptualize how you would handle
the person’s suffering.
What do you think would be important to establish during the initial
therapeutic session?
Then, in your mind’s eye, imagine some of the things you might
attempt to do in subsequent sessions.Base your post on the concepts available in your readings.The purpose of the GDB questions is to see if you can
integrate information from the resources you are studying into “real
life” counseling situations.

Conceptualization:

Below is a list of concepts you might draw
upon when developing your “strategy” for counseling people who are
suffering:

Building Trust

Empathy and Compassion

Importance of Listening

Shared Suffering

Self-Disclosure

Hospitality

Different Sources of Suffering

Importance of Listening

Providing Hope

Confrontation

Irrational Thinking

Correcting Faulty Thinking—Importance of
Truth

Grace and Truth

Brokenness

Holy Spirit

Redemptive Function of Suffering

Love and Respect

Scriptures

Prayer

Use of Citations/References:

As you incorporate some or many of the
concepts given above, make sure that you provide citations for
information you are drawing upon from your course material.Consult the “Basic
Citations and References” for rules on how to properly format
in-text citations and references.Also, please consult your APA style manual.

Additional Resources:

If you have not already done so, please
watch Dr. Campbell’s video on Christian Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
(CCBT), entitled:
Take Captive Every Thought.

Do Not Include Your Personal Story:

Many of you have gone through considerable
pain and suffering in your lives.This post is not a place to discuss your pain or suffering,
or that of your family or friends.The purpose of this post is to get you to start thinking from
the perspective of a professional counselor in the process of
counseling “real life people” with their own grief, sorrow,
problems, or suffering.

Start Your Post Like This:

As mentioned above, in order to provide
structure to your post, I want you to think of organizing your post
temporally.That is, think of walking the reader through your initial
counseling session, and then proceeding to subsequent sessions,
until you finally terminate with the client.Start your post with the following sentence stem:

When
my client enters the room, the first thing I will do is…

Then proceed to “walk me through” the rest
of your counseling with the hypothetical client.You might use some of the following sentence stems as you
proceed: